For a long time they just sat there under the bridge. Waiting felt wrong because he was wracked with worry about Katie, about their little unborn. How was she reacting to the fact that he hadn’t called or returned home? What was she doing? Was she panicking? Were the bad men right now making their way to Karl’s house to get her? But the part of him that wanted to go running for her was beaten back by a practical voice: Varsity seemed to have gone, but he could still be out there, close, searching. He prayed that the world had stopped while they’d been stuck underground.

His paranoia and urge to run manifested itself in jittery movements, which, he realised, Liz had been aware of when she said: ‘Just wait a little longer.’ But she didn’t look up and her voice was dull. He wondered if she was picturing how things had gone down in the cottage after she’d run. All she had was a pair of words in a newspaper: THREE SLAUGHTERED.

‘We need to go. I need to find a phone as quick as possible.’

‘I hope she’s okay,’ Liz said, and then her head came up. Clear streaks through the dirt on her face showed she had been crying. But in those eyes now was a new firmness, as if the tears had sluiced away all sorrow. Maybe a new resolve was developing now that her husband, her protector, was gone.

‘She will—’ he started, and stopped when he heard a noise. A car engine.

‘Liz, wait,’ he said as she scrambled quickly out from under the bridge. Before he could grab her and pull her back, he heard a dog bark nearby.

She climbed the bank and vanished. Karl followed, if only because he didn’t want to be stuck here if they had to run. Liz was running towards the fence. He noticed that another vehicle had pulled up behind the truck.

He was too late to grab her, and she slipped through the gap, onto the street, and moved towards the new vehicle, a VW Caddy van with ‘Anderson Kitchens’ written on the side.

There was a guy in paint-smeared utility trousers and a jumper at the open back door. At his feet was a dog that bolted towards Liz as she approached. Karl relaxed as he realised this guy wasn’t one of those hunting him, just a nobody bringing his dog to the scrubland for exercise.

What happened next occurred with such speed that Karl found himself caught up in it before he could think. A third vehicle was coming down the road. Liz snatched a ball from the dog’s mouth and lobbed it. Hard, high. It sailed over the van and bounced in the middle of the road, and the dog went bounding after it. The driver of the van realised, screamed for the mutt to stop, and chased after it as it ran towards the oncoming third vehicle.

‘I can’t drive,’ Liz said as she snatched open the van’s passenger door.

Karl realised her plan right then, because he heard the van’s engine still running.

---

Thirty seconds later, they were fleeing in a stolen vehicle. He tackled a number of corners, found the main road, and lost the Caddy in heavy traffic. Only then, as he finally took a breath, did he notice a mobile phone mount on the dashboard. With a mobile phone.

He took deep breaths while the landline rang. He needed to adopt a calm tone when Katie answered so she wouldn’t worry. He needed to pretend that all was fine. He had left the shop with Liz, he would say – no mention of psychos chasing them along abandoned subterranean tunnels. He was waiting to call the police, he would say – no mention of hiding under a bridge while killers sniffed out their trail. But he had to insist that she got out of the house. He would get to a nearby supermarket, or somewhere else loaded with people, and arrange to meet her there, and then they’d head to her dad’s house in Harrow. There, among his potted plants and sagging bookcases, they would greet the police and end this infernal chapter of their lives.

From an unknown number, but there was a degree of hope in the voice that answered:

‘Karl?’

‘It’s me, baby,’ he said, a lump in his throat.

But not just hope, he realised. Distress, too.

‘Oh God, Karl, what’s going on? They’re here, they want you—’

And then her voice went dead, and there was a sound like someone snatching the phone. The mobile made a protest-like series of beeps as his fist tightened around it. The next voice he heard was that of a croaky male, and it said: ‘Seabury, you’re a hard man to find…’